Nest Smart Thermostat

I am reviewing the NEST V3 unit for heating and hot water

Good Points

1. Looks nice.

2. Handy being able to control heating and water from out of the house.

Bad Points

1. Very fiddly to program and to change schedule using the stat or the app.

2. Unreliable - Often loses connection to internet, or stops completely. Useless if you are away in the middle of winter and it turns all your heating off, and you have no way of turning it back on.

3. Has a rediculous feature that it boils your hot water cylinder for 2 hours every day, even if you select OFF. Something to do with protecting agains legionella! You have to go deep into the settings to disable this money-wasting feature.

4. The learning feature is rubbish. It thinks you are out when you are in and turns heating off. It turns heating off the moment you leave the house meaning wasted heat. We turn it off well before we leave.

5. They keep changing the software remotely, so the operation of the thermostat completely changes, even OFF to ECO and silly names so you never know how to operate the thing.

I would highly recommend getting a standard simple programmer, and not one of these.

I cant recommend the NEST system highly enough, its awesome.

So long as you take the time to learn how to use it and understand how it works, so that you can set it up correctly, it will be your homes new best friend.

They claim 20% savings, but so far, we have seen far higher savings than this on a 2 bed semi, and also far more stable temperatures in the house, with no "Cold > heating on > hot > heating off" messing about like we used to.

You tell it what temperatures you want at what times of the day and week and it figures the rest out based on that, and will come on accordingly to make sure the temperature is reached by the time you specified.

Have recommended this to everybody, it really is good, and even if you never want to set it up, just using it manually is so much easier than the standard beige box thermostats..

Looks really cool too and it wakes up when you get near it :-)

We bought a Nest a year ago to save money and help regulate the temperature in our house. It claims that the thermostat adjust to the household and remembers the adjustments. We had it set to 70 degrees a year ago for a week and then tried to change to 67degrees. EVERYDAY for a year we have set the Nest back to 67 degrees and EVERYDAY it returns to 70. No matter what changes we make it does not keep the adjustments, it continues to set back to 70. Our bills have gone UP and our frustration is HIGH. We are considering changing back to a basic thermostat that allows US to control what temperature we want in our house not what the NEST decides.